A photographing function is provided not only in a camera, which is a dedicated device, but also in a portable terminal apparatus, such as a portable telephone, and an electronic device handling electronic information, such as a personal computer. This photographing function has a normal photographing mode including a photographing mode for scenery, etc., and a portrait photographing mode for photographing a person as well as a close-up photographing mode for performing close-up photographing. The close-up photographing mode is directed to various applications such as photographing letters and newspapers to record and store the images thereof as image information.
A portable telephone is known that has an OCR (Optical character Recognition) function mode for photographing characters or barcodes in relation to this photographing function (e.g., Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2005-94782). It is also known that a logo is added to a digital camera to notify a user of an operation state by changing a light-emission state of the logo (e.g., Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-134438).
If an object includes small characters, etc., such as letters and newspapers, an image displayed on a screen is inconveniently small and unrecognizable. Although a text document such as e-mail may be displayed in a larger scale on the screen by enlarging a character font, if an image is enlarged by a zoom function, the recorded image itself is enlarged and this is not suitable for image enlargement solely intended for checking. Such a relationship between the zoom function and the recorded image applies not only to the close-up photographing mode but also to the long-distance photographing for scenery, etc., and the portrait photographing. To record an image before zoom-in after an object or an image is checked in an enlarged image using the zoom function, an operation of restoration to the image before zoom-in is necessary.
If such a zoom operation is performed, this is added to a photographing time. In this case, even if a photographable image is displayed, operations are necessary for shifting to the zoom mode for checking the image and for shifting to the photographing after canceling the zoom. Therefore, it may be that operability of a user and promptness of image acquisition are deteriorated.
The switch-over from the normal photographing mode to the close-up photographing mode is performed in a manual operation. If the switch-over to the close-up photographing mode is performed regardless of the image being displayed or whether the object thereof is photographable in close-up, it may be that the acquired image becomes different from the image intended by a user. In this case, troubles occur such as being forced to perform rephotographing and it may be that the photographing becomes unavailable since the timing of photographing is missed for some objects.